Walk into any cafe of bar in rural France at this time of the year and ask if anyone has found any ceps and you will immediately provoke enormous discussion. The bar man will shake his head as he wipes a coffee cup dry, “Non, il n’ y a rien!“ But then the man sitting in the window will pipe up and tell you that his friend found five kilos the day before on the other side of the valley – but he won’t tell you where – for people jealously guard their cep-hunting sites and don’t share this information with just anyone. To the uninitiated, a ‘cep’ here in south-west France is ‘the king of mushrooms’ – ‘le roi des champignons’. So much so, that people refer to ceps as ‘champignons‘ and all the rest are ‘faux champignons‘ or ‘false mushrooms’. They are contrary creatures, appearing only under the most particular conditions and theories abound as to why there hasn’t been a good season of ceps for three years now.
The ideal circumstances apparently depend upon having the right amount of rain and warmth on the right type of soil – and hey presto, out pop the ceps! Simple – but it isn’t. Monsieur Serieys says its best when the moon is waxing. Despite a rainy warm autumn which should have provoked an appearance or two, Madame Fiamazou says it’s because the summer was too dry, and now, her husband says it is too cold, and so on and so on. My favourite explanation why this year was not a good season for ceps was the rather cryptic comment of the local doctor in the village bar, “Ah, but it’s the third year of thirteen moons…”
The truth however is that everyone round here found a couple of kilos or so, but nothing like the autumn of 2006 three years ago – so perhaps there is something in that moon theory? That autumn we managed to freeze over 40 kilos and ate probably another 15 kilos in one form or another - and then the day came that I unplugged the freezer by mistake – and our collection of ceps metamorphosed into a different kind of fungi! Roll on next autumn…
